Reel: ‘Have you anything on tomorrow night?’
McKeever: ‘No.’
Reel: ‘Will you come and give us a dig-out?’
McKeever: ‘Ok.’
….
Reel: ‘Can you play today? We’re stuck.’
McKeever: ‘I don’t mind.’
....
CIARAN McKeever had hung up his Armagh boots in 2017 and knew his limbs wouldn’t carry him for much longer with the club.
But St Patrick’s, Cullyhanna weren’t in a good place, and needed every spare hand they could find.
Retirements, emigration and a few long-term injuries in roughly a 12-month spell had a ravaging effect on the senior team, to the point where they had to fold their reserves.
Teetering on the brink of relegation a couple of seasons ago, McKeever says: “I remember we had a league match down in Grange that we needed to win to keep our senior status. It was nearly like a four-pointer.
“Aidan Nugent was coming back from a cruciate injury and I was doing a rehab session with him down in Grange.
“I had no thoughts of playing that game and Stephen came over to me after Aidan’s session and says: ‘What way are you? Will you play today?’
“‘I don’t mind’, I said.”
Laughing at his lack of preparation for the game now, McKeever says: “I played and I remember at half-time I was seeing stars because I’d no breakfast, nothing.
“I saw my cousin at the fence and said to him: ‘Go over to the shop and get me a bottle a coke – I’m about to f***ing keel over!’
“I was some advertisement at half-time, drinking coke… We won that game.”
McKeever and Stephen Reel were Cullyhanna team-mates from U10 right up.
Father Time had caught up with Reel around the same time as McKeever, and as soon as he left the club’s number three jersey for the next man, the committee landed at his door one night asking him to give the club a dig out and take on the senior team.
Reel was always a steady hand and the right man to “keep the thing between the ditches”.
“Our era was coming to an end – myself, Ciaran, Liam O’Hare, Eugene Casey – we knew the club was in transition,” Reel says.
“We knew it was the end of the road for a lot of us and that there were boys going travelling; it was something the boys wanted to do, they’d stayed around for long enough to try and win a senior championship.
“I knew the holes they’d left were too big to fill, but we took it on for the good of the club. Paudie McCreesh and Mal Mackin were boys who stayed on because we’d poor numbers - and Ciaran was always there to help out and do what he could to support me.
“There were many cups of coffee during those years, trying to work out how to keep the thing afloat.
“But we knew that cycle of players would return home, and the younger boys would get better, and we could be in the position we find ourselves in now [an All-Ireland Intermediate final at Croke Park]. There was no pot of gold sitting there in that first season or two, but we knew that.”
IT’S a cool, grey Tuesday morning approaching Cullyhanna – five days out from them playing in an All-Ireland final at Croke Park.
South Armagh’s lush green hills roll endlessly into the distance.
At the T-junction, where the road signs point right for Newtownhamilton and left for Cullyhanna, there’s a massive black, red and amber hoarding that reads Up The Pat’s.
You keep driving down through the quiet, winding roads, deeper into south Armagh’s bosom.
Flags and bunting appear on either side of the road, fluttering wildly, the kind of colour and movement that gives this place a strong, excitable pulse and proclaims gloriously to its people that this winter will be short.
Through these darkened months, what’s taking place here is a group of people that decided to make a difference; they felt duty-bound to fire the imagination of the next generation – so that this proud rural townland will always have a strong pulse, a reason for being, and where passion for the game will be forever stitched into their souls.
“People talk about clubs, really and truly, it’s just families when you think about it,” Dunloy hurling manager Gregory O’Kane once said. “Without that we are nothing.”
..........
IT’S roughly 15 years since I last stood above the holy ground of St Patrick’s, Cullyhanna to interview Ciaran McKeever.
In 2008, he was still in the prime of his playing days with Armagh and would collect an Ulster winner’s medal later that season.
The clubrooms are bedecked with framed photographs of Cullyhanna teams of the distant and not-too-distant past. It seems any boy or girl that ever kicked a ball and wore the distinctive red, black and amber jersey can be found up on the walls somewhere.
Reel and McKeever have been joined at the hip for as far back as the pair can remember.
A seamless friendship, it’s hard to know when one of them starts and the other one ends.
They’re side by side in the middle row of the 1995 All-Ireland Feile (U13) team where Cullyhanna lost the final after a heartbreaking penalty shoot-out to Garrycastle of Westmeath in Castlebar.
Growing up, they won plenty too, including a county intermediate title in ‘08.
They played in two senior county finals – but lost both to Crossmaglen (2013) and Maghery (2016).
Time is a merciless line. Playing careers go by in a blink of an eye.
Reel is five years retired and, barring a few dig outs, McKeever wasn’t far behind him.
Theresa Murray – mother of defender Mickey – has boiled the kettle and provided some scones and biscuits this morning.
The clubrooms are up since the early ‘Noughties’ – built by volunteers’ hands.
The only part of the project that was put out to tender was the plumbing.
Sean McKeever – Ciaran’s uncle, who sadly passed away earlier this month – helped put a roof over members’ heads.
Back then, Ciaran served his time under his uncle Sean and helped with the plastering of the new clubrooms.
Brickie Brendan McConville - father of current player Barry – lent a hand.
Oliver Carthy, who won intermediate titles with the club in 1977 and ‘88, was one of the joiners.
Mickey Hoey got his Trowel out too.
“Basically, the whole community was involved,” says Reel. “Even those who weren’t tradesmen were here labouring.
“It was one of those projects the community knew they needed. Everybody rowed in and helped and did what they could.
“Before that, we got changed in the community centre [pointing behind where we’re sitting], but the changing rooms were too small.”
“It’s a good size,” McKeever says with a sense of satisfaction about what its members built.
“It keeps everybody local after matches and when teams finish training, they come in here for a cup of tea.”
GAA clubs cannot function without kind souls like Theresa Murray and Briege Lloyd.
FIVE years ago, St Patrick’s Cullyhanna were a club nervous under the beginning change.
Having gone so close to winning their first-ever senior championship in 2016, they were running on empty soon afterwards.
A clutch of retirements was always going to be tough enough to absorb, but a host of the younger players leaving to see the world was a devastating blow.
Pearse Casey and Kieran McCooey headed off to Australia but are now back and have been integral to Cullyhanna’s historic run this season.
Tony Donnelly spent time in New York and came home to put his shoulder to the St Pat’s wheel.
Sean Connell, the full-back, had injuries and took time out. Likewise, Mickey Murray.
Both are back playing again.
Gary McCooey, Colm Hoey, Shane Conlon, Ciaran and Conor Nugent are all still living in Australia – but have returned home to watch their club in Sunday’s All-Ireland final against Cill na Martra of Cork.
“I never wanted to leave Cullyhanna,” Reel says, who is a pedigree cattle farmer.
“But I appreciate everyone’s different and have their own interests. To be honest, a lot of the reasons [for staying] would have been football.
“Your career is short, and I wanted to play as much as I could and there was never a big pull for me to go anywhere at any stage.”
With massive holes blown in every sector of the team, relegation was inevitable at some point.
Indeed, a couple of demotions later they found themselves on the intermediate rung in Armagh.
“The boys who stayed showed great character,” Reel says. “They kept training, kept trying, never gave up. Never missed a night during the bad times. We were not getting hammered – we were just coming up short, losing games by a point or two.”
The fine margins were gut-wrenching, especially for a club paddling furiously to stay afloat.
To this day, the Cullyhanna manager rues a championship quarter-final loss to Maghery in the dying seconds that might have saw the club change course.
“The game was heading for a draw,” Reel recalls. “For the last kick-out, we caught it, dropped it, and Maghery went up and scored a goal – Brian Fox. That would have sent us into a county semi-final, with a lot of players gone.
“That was a big moment and one which typified the next couple of years where we were that close.”
Relegation eventually arrived over one of the final weekends of last season when they fell to Mullaghbawn on a Friday night and Clan na Gael on the Sunday.
Not even the best efforts of county men Aiden Nugent, Jason Duffy or Ross McQuillan could prevent it.
The prospect of playing intermediate football in 2023 hurt everyone at the club.
When one player left to go travelling at the beginning of last season, it had a domino-effect.
But once one player returned, the domino-effect kicked in again.
A half-dozen of them came home to bolster the team and were among the squad who sat in the home changing room one night 14 months ago while some home truths were issued between players and management, but also with the sharp intent of making amends.
“I don’t think Stephen gets the credit for what he did and what was happening around him,” McKeever says.
“[After being relegated to intermediate level] We thought it was only fair we stayed one more year with him and have a rattle at it because we knew that the squad we could assemble would be good enough to win Armagh – if we applied ourselves properly.
“That night down in the home changing room about 14 months ago now, we spoke about Croke Park – that’s being brutally honest. It was a pipedream back then.
“Every teams speaks about it. And we spoke about it last Saturday night after we beat Allenwood [in the All-Ireland semi-final]: ‘Fourteen months ago, boys, this was a dream – and now were 60 minutes away from it.’”
Cullyhanna swept to victory in the county championship before winning a nail-bitter under the lights in Omagh against a fancied Pomeroy side, the first time the south Armagh club tasted victory on the provincial stage.
Suddenly, talk of driving into Jones’s Road on a cold Sunday afternoon in January didn’t seem a daft idea after all.
It just so happens the All-Ireland final will be played on Majella McKeever’s birthday - Ciaran’s mother, who passed away in July 2021 – an inspiring figure who gave life to Ladies football at the club and which thrives still under Paul Toner.
It may be a quiet Tuesday morning where the kids are in school and the adults are working - but in the winter chill there’s an unmistakable pulse here.
The reason why the red, black and amber bunting and flags flutter from every lamppost in the village and beyond is because a group of Cullyhanna people sat down one night and decided to make a difference.
Gaelic football is a way of life here. It’s a reason for being. It’s immeasurable the impact of kicking a ball over the bar enough times can have on a community.
Stephen Reel, Ciaran McKeever, Sean Nugent, Mal Mackin, Paddy Savage, Paddy Conlon, Shane McKeever, Francis Nugent and all the players have embarked on a magnificent, life-affirming journey.
Together, they’ve made the change.
“We lost a lot of good people in Cullyhanna this year and over the last number of years between very young people to older people,” McKeever says.
“We’ve spoken about that before every match. We knew we had a job to do on the football field but we also felt there was an onus on us to shorten the winter for people, for families in the community who were suffering.
“Obviously we weren’t going to fix things but if we could shorten the winter by another couple of weeks and give the people of Cullyhanna something to cling on to and something to talk about, the nights would be easier on them.”
This is the holy ground of Cullyhanna. Where there’s football, there’s always life.
